Upgrade advice for Half-Life 2

[zinfandel]

I'm currently experiencing some choppiness in some newer games. The demo for Unreal 2 SP was a mess in one particular fight scene, and the audio was choppy too (indicating general system slowdown and not just video problems?)

Current system:

Dual PIII 1 Ghz
512 MB RAM
GeForceMX2

Question(s) 1:
Is my gaming bottleneck Processor or VidCard limited? Is there any way (benchmarks, etc) to determine this scientifically? Can I get away with upgrading just one or the other to be ready for Half-Life 2, Deux Ex 2, Halo PC, etc?

Question 2:
If I just need a new video card, is an ATI Radeon 9800 the best bet right now for about $200-$250, or should I go nVidia, or should I wait a month for price drops?

Question(s) 3:
If I need a new proc/mb, should I go Athlon 2800-3000XP or Intel P4 2.6-3.0? Where's the best price/performance ratio once you add in Motherboard and RAM?

Question 4:
Should I get a single stick of 1GB RAM or 2 sticks of 512?

Thanks in advance for any advice you can give me, and if I need to provide any more information for you to be able to answer, please let me know!

 

[Corporate Thug]

1. it is BOTH cpu and video card limited, more so video though
2. 9800 is a great choice and a lot of people have been able to get theirs to 9800 pro levels. prices will prolly drop some with the release of the next card do prolly not all that much for the non pros
3. the 800 mhz fsb p4 will prolly give u better performance BUT athlon64 is looking very promising on the gaming front so u may want to hold out
4. 1 GB stick doesnt make any sense. too expensive and you can use dual channel

 

[Jeff7]

1. I'm not sure, but a game might need to be coded specially to take advantage of dual processors. If it only uses one processor, a 1GHz proc may be a bottleneck.

2. 9800 is among the best now; I think it's neck-and-neck with nVidia's top of the line, but I'm not well read on the latest benchmarks. A Geforce2 MX is definitely too slow for new games - at least if they're to be played at decent resolutions.

3. The P4 3.06GHz (or is it 3.2GHz out now) looks like the performance leader now. It might not be the best value though - maybe try a 2.8 and overclock it to 3GHz+. I'm not an Intel expert though; I mainly deal with AMD's - nForce2 and an XP2500 (Barton) seems to be the popular pairing now.

4. If the motherboard you go with supports dual channel, get two sticks, especially on a P4 platform, as it shows a much better performance increase from it.

 

[Mr.IncrediblyBored]

1. You will be severely video card limited. You can probably put a band-aid on the issue with a new(er) video card.
2) Slight refreshes from both nVidia and ATi should be coming out in the next couple months. You might be able to snag a current card on the cheap when/if the refresh occurs. Keep in mind HL2 is supposed to be out in another few weeks, so if you wait for new video cards, you'll be stuck with your current rig.
3 - Short of getting an Athlon64/Opteron based machine, the P4 is a bit better for gaming. Truthfully, at higher resolutions you'll be video card limited, rather than CPU limited so it won't matter that much anyway.
4 I would purchase 2 - 1GB DIMMS if I were building a gaming rig, but that's just because I like overkill.

By the way:
HalfLife 2 Hardware Question...?
Half-Built Computer Will be Done around the 8/29 9/10
Which video card do i need to play half life two?
Hows does this look for my Half-Life 2 system?

 

[zinfandel]

Thank you!

You guys rock. These are just the kind of answers I needed.

I'm gonna pick up a 9800 128 and see what that does to my current games.

The dell 400sc deal looks pretty sweet right now.. with the rest of my current hardware and a new 9800 slapped into that, I think I've got a winner. More than I planned to spend, but a sweet deal!